Our Trip to the UK: part 1

 Our trip to the UK was so long and we did so much I thought I would break it up a little bit! Otherwise you might be reading a novel!

Lucky me I was only home about 10 days between my trip to Barcelona and we were off on another adventure.  The joys of living abroad :)

Instead of flying we decided to take the ferry across the English Channel to get to England. What this means is we drive 3 hours, through the Netherlands, Belgium and France to hop on a boat for 2 hours and then we drove another hour an a half in England to the place we were staying. It was a long day in the car but who can say they have been to 4 countries in just one day? We can!

Playing on the ferry

The ferry was really neat, we just drove our car right on board, hopped out, had some lunch while Jackson played in the play place and before we knew it, it was time to get back in our car and drive off the boat. Only this time we were to be driving on the "wrong" side of the road! I was really nervous about this, but it turned out to be fine.  Josh did great and I only got a little excited a couple of times.

So much excitement he couldn't stay awake

We were lucky enough to be able to stay with some friends while we were there which made the experience even better. I think it's always  nice to see the country as not just a tourist and how a local sees it.  Did I mention they live on a farm? Jackson was in heaven.  There were tractors, combines and tons of open space to just run.  He didn't even know what to do with himself.  He said tractor on repeat the whole time we were there. Making me swear I would never buy him a tractor again!!

The Combine!

We spent the remainder of the day just playing with Jackson outside and then Saturday we went off on our first adventure to Warwick's Castle.  This was about a two hour drive for us and to be honest wasn't quite worth it.  It was a neat place for a 5-7 year old boy but Jackson didn't care, he would have rather just played outside in the mud with the tractors. Actually he did find a tractor there and fell in the mud to get to it!  (He has a good eye)

Inside at Warwick's Castle

The Queen was there :)

Jackson sharing his lunch with dad

The tractor

They had a bird show and we got get really close to the eagle

Woah! Playing on the playground

Sunday we got to go to our friends' daughter's Christening.  It was in an amazing old church, and was really neat to be apart of it all.  The party to follow was even better.  We got to meet lots of new people and had a great time, even when Jackson had us locked up in the toy room playing with cars.

The house they live in is about 300 years old. Can you believe it? It was unbelievable, an old farm house with a good 6+ bedrooms. It goes on and on, so much character. It felt like we were living in the movies. We loved it.

The house we stayed in from the back

Playing outside, so happy!

We had such a good time staying with them and it made us even more homesick to be around such a great family!  We can't thank them enough for letting us stay and making us feel right at home!